Appointing a believable panel would be difficult, Torvalds
said in an e-mail interview. "I suspect the people I'd like to see
are not people SCO would care for or [who] would be able to sign an
NDA on it. The thing I would want is somebody who is able to
actually trace things back in time to be able to make a judgment of
whether it came from UnixWare or from Linux. Somebody who is
technical enough and has enough background in the kernel that he
can follow it down without going mad", he said.

However, Torvalds did suggest DiBona as one possible
candidate, along with suggestions to consider "the crowd around Tim
O'Reilly" or "any journalist who is technically competent".

DiBona said in an e-mail interview that he is willing to look
at SCO's evidence, and he does not have any legal "taint" from
previous development work that would make him unable to do so. As
an experienced programmer with a background in regression testing
and security software, DiBona says he would have to consider the
possibility that similar code could be evidence of convergence, not
infringement.

"In millions upon millions of lines of code, you can likely
expect that in two completely different codebases with much of the
same desired outcome (OS, printer driver, whatever) you'll find
similar code segments", he said.

Torvalds cited a linux-kernel mailing list (lkml) posting
from Christoph Hellwig, a former employee at SCO, then called
Caldera. Hellwig points out the impracticality of actually getting
copied code from UnixWare accepted by the tough critics on the
mailing list. "The kernel internals are so different that you'd
need a big glue layer to actually make it work and you can guess
how that would be ripped apart in a usual lkml review", Hellwig
wrote.